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The U.N.’s Framework Conference on Climate Change held two weeks of negotiations in Bonn, Germany last month, to plan the agenda for the major climate summit in Durban, South Africa, at the end of the year. These talks basically set the stage for whatever global agreement will replace the Kyoto Protocol, which expires next year. As a country very much affected by the effects of global warming and also initiating major efforts towards mitigating same, Guyana must keep abreast of developments.
The billion-dollar question is whether Durban will create a new climate regime for the period after 2012 — either by continuing with the Kyoto Protocol, which puts binding emissions caps on developed countries, or by creating a new agreement involving developing countries (or at least the major emitters among them)? One of the most difficult tasks for all delegates in Bonn was the issue of a second commitment period under the Kyoto Protocol. Most developed countries claimed that a new, legally-binding framework should include all major emitters.
Developing nations’ current demand, on the other hand, is an extension of Kyoto, which obliges almost 40 industrialized nations to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 5.2 percent below 1990 levels from 2008-12. It should be noted that the world’s two largest greenhouse gas (GHG) emitters – China and the United States – are not bound by the Kyoto Protocol. China is classified as a “developing nation” and the US never ratified Kyoto, arguing it wrongly omitted 2012 goals for emerging economies and would cost U.S. jobs.
Overall, expectations for the future of the Kyoto Protocol are low, and some doubt whether a second commitment period is feasible with only support from the EU, which accounts for only around 11% of the world’s GHG emissions. The position of the US is critical. At Bonn, it became clear that it was pushing a “pledge-and-review” process where every country will commit to what it believes it can do based on its own national circumstances. What this means is that on a hope and a prayer, it expects that the total emissions will be within the limits called for by the scientific consensus. If the totals are over the line, a new review is undertaken later.
The problems with a pledge-and-review approach are not difficult to identify. First and foremost there are no incentives for any country to reduce their emissions and secondly, the developed countries that created the problem in the first place now get a free ride. The pledges that have been put on the table are woefully short of what is actually needed. If that is the best we can achieve at Durban, we are looking at a five-degree warmer world at the end of the century, which would basically mean it would be unrecognizable to people living on Earth today. In the non-binding regime that the U.S. is trying to put forward, we’re really heading for climate catastrophe. While the Obama administration signalled that it would make a clear break with its predecessor’s insistence on having its own way, and reengage with the multilateral process, the reality has been a continuation of the identical policies – just delivered in a more pleasant tone. The US is not now denying climate change, but it is leading the charge for people to drop out of a regime (Kyoto) that has any kind of a compliance mechanism and has them on the hook for delivering real emissions reductions and reducing greenhouse gas pollution.
The fact of the matter is the Kyoto Protocol is very important because it contains key rules to quantify and monitor efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and various market-based mechanisms for mitigation. It will be a great loss to bury it in Durban, South Africa, in December 2011. One way out is to have less binding targets for such big developing emitters or apply such binding targets after 2015, for instance. Using conditional incentives for big emitters from developing countries is another way to encourage them to jump on board.
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